A brisk ITV murder mystery with a sharper programme underneath it, about what police officers say to each other when they think nobody is reading. Keegan is good, Ian Hart is better, and the whodunnit keeps getting in the way.
The Blame is a six-part ITV drama adapted from Charlotte Langley’s novel by Namsi Khan, Ashley Sanders and Megan Gallagher, and it is two programmes at once. One is a murder mystery of the kind the channel has made for decades, with a body, a board of suspects and a twist at the end of each hour. The other is about the police force doing the investigating, and about what its officers say to each other when they think nobody is reading. The second is the better programme, and the first keeps interrupting it. It is good, and worth your week if you like your detectives tired and your coppers compromised, though the reviews so far have been warmer than we are.
Michelle Keegan plays DI Emma Crane as a woman who has learned to keep her face still in a room full of men waiting for it to move. It is a quieter performance than the one she gave in Fool Me Once, and a better one. She listens well, which is rarer on television than it should be, and when she does let something show it is usually in the wrong company. The writers have not made Crane a saint. She cuts corners, she keeps things from people who ought to know them, and Keegan plays those choices as habits rather than as plot.
Ian Hart’s DCI Kenneth Walker is the programme’s best idea. Hart plays him as a manager rather than a monster, a man who thinks of himself as fair and has the clear-up figures to prove it, and who cannot hear what is wrong with the way his team talks. Douglas Booth’s Tom Radley is affable and easy, and Booth lets you like him for a good while before you start counting what he laughs at. Gavin Spokes, Josh Bolt and Cel Spellman fill out the floor as men who are not villains, exactly, but who have never once been asked to consider whether they might be. That is the point, and the programme makes it without a speech.
The scenes that got at us are the transcripts. Messages between officers, drawn from real ones, are put on screen plainly, without music and without anyone reacting to them for us, and they are worse than anything the murder plot manages. We were angry, and then a little ashamed of how surprised we were, because none of it is news. What makes it land is that the men typing these things are the same men we have been watching do their jobs competently for an hour. The programme trusts us to hold both facts at once.
It is well made without drawing attention to it. Phil Wood shoots the station in the flat, even light of a place with too many ceiling panels and saves the shadows for outside, so that the office looks safer than it is. Elizabeth Mary Moore’s incident room is a working office rather than a set: half-wiped whiteboards, a kettle nobody has descaled, a jacket on a chair that stays there for three episodes. Lauren Miller puts Crane in the same dark coat throughout, and the coat starts to look like armour. Sarah Warne’s score is mostly a low pulse and has the sense to stay out of the interview rooms.
The trouble is the machinery. Claire Tailyour and Rebecca Rycroft direct with pace, and Ben McKinstrie cuts to match, and there are stretches where the programme moves so quickly that nobody is allowed to sit with anything. Each episode delivers its turn on schedule. We saw two of them coming and did not mind; a third is there to be a twist and for no other reason, and it costs the programme some of the trust it had earned with the transcripts. The whodunnit and the argument about the force are pulling in different directions, and by the fifth hour the whodunnit is winning.
The obvious comparison is Prime Suspect, which put Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in a room like this one more than thirty years ago and let her stay there, slowly, for hours. The Blame is not that. It does not have the patience, and it does not have the nerve to let its mystery be the least interesting thing about it. It has the right subject, though, and a cast that knows how to play men who are pleasant to your face.
Watch it two episodes at a time, not six in a night. Taken fast, the twists are what you will remember. Taken slowly, it is the messages, and they are the part it does best.
